to start is to commit …
This is going to be about nature.
But how can we define nature?
It is what we are aware of in perception. (Whitehead, 1964:28)Whitehead asks the question, “How is it that there is always something new?” and this is his starting point in the exploration of the solution space: For a mathematician, the starting point has the imperative of a logical tsunami that one must ride as far as one can. The conclusion of such a journey produces consequences theoretical and pragmatic that belay a consistency not available in our current subject/object paradigm. The inevitable conclusion is that the universe is a multiplicity, more process than thing: As Buckminster Fuller declared, “I seem to be a verb.” The consequences revealed are manifold, and in Deleuzian terms, they are Interesting, Remarkable, and Important…
Philosophy does not consist in knowing and it is not inspired by truth. Rather it is categories like Interesting, Remarkable, or Important that determine success or failure. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994:82)
- Interesting in framing, remarkable in consistency, and important in explanations to old dilemmas. Major re-framings are:
- ideas and objects have equal ontological status as equivalent elements of awareness (immanent ontology)
- reality is empirical where our multi-epistemic experience always precedes and exceeds our knowing (transcendent empiricist)
- Remarkable in consistency:
- experience is subjective, singular and personal
- experience is relative and quantitative and not simply human
- Important for explaining:
- the actualization of the virtue
- who we are is as our possibility: identity is predication
transcendental empiricism: an immanent ontology
Experience in the degree to which it is experience is heightened vitality. - Dewey, 2005:18
The philosophical warrant of my research is supported by the ontology of process philosophy (Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson) within the epistemological framework of transcendental empiricism (Deleuze). Our knowing comes from our experience of reality as process. Transcendental empiricism supports a single reality as the source of our individuated and mediated experience of it declaring all knowing to be situated in and supported by experience. Deleuze shows that our experience always exceeds our conception of reality through the constant generation of novelty, inverting Kantian transcendental idealism whereby concepts are alleged to exceed experience.
Our raw experience of difference actualizes ideas forcing us to invent new ways of thinking, constantly pushing the limits of reality as we know it. In our immersion in process (direct experience realized as flow) all dualistic framings of subject/object become non-sensical and experience necessarily transcends our conceptualization of it. Reflection of our experience results in conceptualization, signs of experience that point to but never quite capture the ultimately ineffable flow of reality, always new and always novel.
The usefulness of this ontological and epistemological framing philosophically is that it resolves dilemmas perpetuated by naive realist ontological framings, and significantly, explains tensions between knowledge generation and knowledge integration (Gebert, Boerner, Kearney, 2010) that remain fundamental to the conception of design as creating [new] experience.
The bifurcation of Information Systems Research into positivist science as descriptive, attempting to get at what is real and designing as prescriptive, supporting dynamic change is a well documented division between functionalism and interpretation (Hevner et al, 2004). The fundamental nature of both being and becoming are necessarily insinuated in any ontological framing of design science as what is, and what could be. Ontological framings range from Idealism that gives primacy to the reality of ideas to Materialism that gives primacy to the reality of physical things. Beneath both framings however, is the primacy of experience: We experiences both ideas and matter regardless of the differences in their attribution, specifically, of space and time. Because we can experience both ideas and matter they are necessarily real. What Whitehead referred to as the ‘Ontological Principle’, and Bergson as the ‘Univocality of Being ‘ asserts the ontological reality of idea and matter and their equivalent ontological status.
The ontological approach of this project presumes the ontological equivalence of ideas and matter and their empirical expression as conscious experience as transcendental empiricism as presented in the work of Gilles Deleuze. This immanent ontology for this project is not just the focus and rigor it gives to empirical experience as a result of the closing of metaphysical speculation over the underlying reality but the value it affords experience: Only experience is reflected upon and although reality is asserted, there can be no unexperienced, i.e. metaphysical, claims made. Experience is the ontological primary, not the vehicle for investigating some underlying reality. Further, the immanent ontology of Deleuze shows the process of creating as continuous yet without any direction or goal.
The equivalence of idea and material as experience is familiar approach from the phenomenological perspective with this fundamental and key difference: There is no concern or suggestion of the ‘things’ beneath perception, or the attempt to explain and resolve individual perceptions within an objective reality. While phenomenology seeks the reality beyond individual experience, immanent ontology explores the reality of individual, subjective experience (Bryant, 2008). Placing philosophical investigation at the level of individual, subjective, and singular experience without trying to justify or harmonize all experience other than to declare that there is a reality beyond the individual experience that connects us, removes the insoluble problems that are counter to experience and remain without resolution other than as (non-justified) belief (Deleuze, 1968).
The problem, rather, is what emerges when representation and identity are taken as metaphysically or epistemologically primitive terms upon which the questions of philosophy are posed. According to Deleuze, when representation and identity are taken as metaphysically primitive, philosophy falls into insoluble problems. (Bryant, 2008: 5)
In other words, an immanent ontological position is realist, declaring a common reality beneath the singular subjective experience and empiricist, fundamentally asserting “the concrete richness of the sensible” (Delueze, Parnet, 2002: 54) while deeply interrogating the ‘is-ness’ of the individual and the experience without assuming their normative ontological status. In upholding the primacy of empirical experience, including the experience of ideas, which is to say, thinking, this project refuses to place meaning where it cannot be warranted or where it no longer is useful.
Empiricists are not theoreticians, they are experimenters: they never interpret, they have no principles. (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002:55)
Maintaining an immanent ontology in a realism that accepts the significance of ideas as an idealist while asserting the underlying common reality, presents a philosophical ontology coherent with post-modern sensibility without succumbing to its radical relativism: reality is subjective but it is not ‘just’ constructed in experience but can be evaluated as more or less by its richness. Significantly, this grounds this project of design as the creating of experience, firmly in experience. Further, where the fundamental unit of idealism is ideas and the fundamental unit of realism is matter, the fundamental unit of immanence is dynamic change.
no mistakes on the bandstand…
Stefon Harris talks about the ‘sacred space’ of the bandstand, where jazz unfolds (http://www.ted.com/talks/stefon_harris_there_are_no_mistakes_on_the_bandstand.html) I think that we should try to understand the architectures of participation, vis-a-vis design[ning] from this perspective as in many ways, the ideal collaboration in a space of possibility is the jazz performance. It is a space of the here and now where the only mistake is is to ignore input. Absorb, reject, modify… are all viable and positive alternatives but to ignore input is a mistake… And to micro manage, to bully your vision is the other… The art of creating together lies in the ability to listen, to be aware of difference…